Whatever the source of the ghost story, Boyer believes most have served a specific purpose in their repeated telling. He said they reinforce values, or let people know what the “rules” might be. A ghost story may dissuade people from engaging in some activity, such as to keep children away from an old mine shaft or uncovered well, or a dilapidated barn. There are clearly other values as well, he added—pure entertainment being one—but he’s found there’s an “uplifting” or spiritual function too, though some storytellers “are loathe to use that word in this way.”
Among Boyer’s favorite yarns are those he has culled from people on the lower Wisconsin River, roughly from Sauk City down to Prairie du Chien. He said there is a story milieu there that exists in only a few other places in the state. It is also along the river that he has found a recurring character under various names—sometimes just the Old Man—but who could be Wisconsin’s variation of the trickster, a prank-playing spirit found in legends of various cultures over the millennia. The Wisconsin variant ascribes misfortunes of most any kind to the one-eyed Old Man.
He sometimes steals the biggest fish a person catches, sometimes causes accidents at the boat landing, and sometimes even capsizes a boat if he’s irritated enough.
According to Boyer, any sort of mishap gets attributed to the Old Man. Boyer’s theory is that the character might have had its beginnings with some older Ho-Chunk trickster.
“There must have been a time when these people who lived outdoor lives, trapping and so forth, must have come in contact with Native Americans. I have a feeling the [trickster] story started in the area around that time.”
The trickster tradition in the American ghost story is rather common. Boyer has found different versions among Native American peoples as well as Europeanized accounts from along the Wisconsin River. But today, the story may be used more as a “cover” for a practical joke than an authentic ghost story. “Some guys delight in getting a friend to put his boat in the water and then getting him off on some sort of errand. When he comes back, he discovers that his boat is filled with water.” His friends try to persuade him that a “ghost” was responsible.
Nevertheless, the ghostly trickster is still often blamed for human failings: “In farming country it’s what sours the cow’s milk, it’s why the ham is missing from the smokehouse, never mind that the hired man left yesterday for parts unknown.”
Boyer, an attorney by profession, said that he is not particularly concerned with “truth” in his avocational pursuit of folktales.
“I would never look at a ghost story in the same way that I would look at an evidentiary matter in a worker’s compensation hearing. I couldn’t treat them in that fashion. I do believe that most of the people I’ve talked to are sincere, that something did happen to them. It’s then a question of interpretation. Often what they saw were variables—an unusual light in an abandoned house, or a noise in the barn, or some recurrent physical phenomenon outdoors—a glow maybe.”
That’s not to say, however, that Boyer has not been gripped by a first-person account of the supernatural. After all, he has had his own experiences in that realm. But the one anecdote that sticks out above all others in his mind was told to him several years ago as he was collecting stories along the Wisconsin River.
“An elderly man in Avoca, on the southern shore of the river, told me a story of what happened to him when he was a young man … [during] World War I or … before. One morning he was trapping in the backwater when he walked across the ice and fell through. He claimed to have just about given up that he was ever going to get out when a hand reached down and pulled him out. He thought he saw an old man in front of him on the bank. He coughed and sputtered and wiped his eyes but nobody was there.”
Arthur, the Impudent Ghost
Shortly after A.J. Nielsen moved into her house at Sparta, she wished she had not. She was to recall many times over the next months the odd hesitancy of the previous, elderly owner before agreeing to sell even though it had been vacant for fifteen years. A.J. had been attracted to the well-kept, two-story house for reasons that even she sometimes could not understand; though she especially admired its charming and spacious rooms, there seemed to be something else pulling her toward ownership.
The troubles began almost immediately; A.J. and her two children confided in each other that they felt “uneasy” sometimes. Within weeks, their disquiet intensified with a distant scratching that the family attributed to mice or bats in the large, walk-in attic that occupied a third floor, except that searches never revealed any evidence of rodents or flying mammals.
But that all changed one night when A.J. arrived home from work at ten in the evening. She found her son and daughter armed with baseball bats, their faces pale with fright. They said they had been watching television when they heard something jumping up and down from somewhere on the floors above. The chandelier in the dining room was actually swinging back and forth, they said.
With flashlights and baseball bats, the trio climbed the staircase to search the bedrooms and attic above.
“The chill was terrible upstairs,” A.J. remembered. “We all held our breath as we opened the attic door.”
Stacks of unpacked boxes were exactly where they had been placed earlier. Nothing had fallen. Nothing had been disturbed.
But later things got much, much worse.
Small items placed on a table one minute went missing the next. Locked doors swung open. Doors left ajar suddenly slammed shut.
“When I was in the bathtub there would be doors slamming and footsteps all over the house,” A.J. recalled with a shudder.
Every family member was awakened during the night at one time or another by scratching noises or loud, thumping sounds. A.J.’s son often bounded downstairs to say he had felt some presence at the top of the stairs icily staring at him. His sister thought she sensed her brother standing nearby on the stairs one night as she watched television. Expecting him to pop into the room and play a joke on her, she flung open the door that led out into the hallway and staircase. A blast of cold air hit her in the face, and then a hissing. The girl ran upstairs and found her brother fast asleep in his bedroom.
Early one morning, A.J.’s daughter awakened to the pressure of a hand pushing against her side. “That was the last straw for her,” A.J. said of her adult daughter. “She moved out and got her own apartment.”
The Nielsen haunting also affected the family’s social life. A.J. hesitated to invite friends over, given the nightly commotions and sudden, unpredictable chills that swept the house. Two acquaintances who did drop in told A.J. they had felt uncomfortable during their visit.
An electrician hired to rewire the house started on a day when A.J. was not home. From then on out, he refused to work there unless she was home. He told her he felt someone breathing on his neck, watching from over his shoulder as he worked.
A.J.’s former husband stopped by one day to visit their son. The boy had not yet returned from school, and A.J. had left the house to run an errand. When she got back, her ex-husband was standing outside, pale and shaken. “I don’t know what happened,” he told her, “but something made me get out. It’s just like ice in there.”
So onerous was her life there that A.J. began to doubt her own sanity. On a day when the turmoil seemed unceasing, she ran to the bone-chilling attic and fell sobbing to the floor.
“Why are you doing this to me?” she cried out. “I have never hurt you. I have no other place to go!”
And then a remarkable calm filled the room. She felt the pressure of a hand on her shoulder, but this was a reassuring touch that conveyed warmth and understanding. A.J. thought that at that moment a kind of truce had been reached with whatever the source of the haunting had been.
But if A.J. thought it was over, she was mistaken. Although the unexplained noises and sudden cold spots subsided, she was to face a new ordeal.
An apparition materialized in the form of a slight man in a dark suit and white shi
rt. His pant legs were narrowly tailored; a large, orange cat stood by his side. The faint image was always wrapped in mist.
In the days and weeks to come, A.J. caught glimpses of her resident ghost sometimes gazing out a window or sometimes slipping quietly up the staircase. She took to calling him Arthur, for no particular reason, and even held one-sided conversations with him. Occasionally, she asked him to watch over the house while she was gone!
One week there was no sign of Arthur, but the ghostly cat was still very much around.
“He’d rub against my legs when I was cooking at the stove,” A.J. said. “When I’d look down I’d see this shadowy figure just disappearing” through the doorway. Sometimes she’d hear him jump to the floor from a windowsill, the curtains fluttering at the sudden movement.
A.J. knew Arthur had returned when she heard the front door slam shut. She came into the hall just in time to see his murky form going upstairs carrying a leather valise with strap bindings.
Although A.J. had begun looking for another place to live, she continued to fix up “Arthur’s house.” He seemed to approve of the work, and was even helpful and protective toward her.
On one occasion, she slipped off a ladder but unseen arms caught her and lifted her to safety. Another time she was running late for work and misplaced her car keys. She called upon Arthur for help. There was a slight clunk and the keys were on the table beside her.
A.J. found another key when cleaning the kitchen cupboards. It didn’t appear to fit anything in the house, but she slipped it on her key ring anyway for safekeeping.
After her watch broke, A.J. said Arthur guided her to the attic, where she found a small, gold wristwatch with a woman’s strap in the middle of the floor. In all of her trips to the attic, she had never seen it. A jeweler told her that all the watch needed was a good cleaning to run like new. A.J. wondered to whom the watch had belonged. Perhaps it had been someone important in Arthur’s life and now he wanted to share it with someone else.
Though A.J. longed to ask the former owner questions about Arthur, she kept to herself. After all, she reasoned, if word got out that the house was haunted, who would buy it?
With the passing weeks, Arthur became even bolder in his appearances. He often sat on the kitchen stool when A.J. was baking or washing dishes. The conversations were still one-sided—A.J. chatted away; Arthur remained silent. He seemed to like her but still resented her friends. When they visited, the chandeliers swayed and icy breezes swept through the rooms.
A.J. became quite fond of Arthur, yet she knew she had to move away. She yearned for a normal lifestyle, one free of unwanted ghosts. At the same time she was fearful that he might in some way try to prevent her from leaving. She need not have worried.
Finally she found a suitable new house, bought it from the builder, and moved right in. A.J. claimed that to her astonishment the key she found in her kitchen cabinets fit the lock on the front door of her new house!
During the months before the old house was sold, A.J. made regular trips back to clean and keep it secure.
“I could still feel his presence,” she said. “But he was much quieter than usual, almost a little sad.”
Arthur made far fewer appearances during her infrequent stops at the house. Eventually the house did sell, presumably ghost and all.
On the day when the new family was moving in, A.J. paid her last visit. Two little girls were playing outside.
“Look,” one of them called out. “There’s a man in your upstairs window!”
A.J. looked up. Arthur stood gazing down at them. His cat was perched on the sill. “Good-bye,” she whispered. He raised his hand to say farewell and was gone. The cat remained in the window a moment longer and then he, too, was no more.
Cassandra
Not all family ghosts are kept in the closet or stalk about the house frightening residents or startling visitors. Take the case of B. T. Jutes * of Crawford County for example. Hers was the live-in kind of ghost: a friendly, solicitous woman who watched over the children and helped B. T. with her genealogical research.
According to B. T., the ghost’s name was Cassandra and she first appeared in a kind of psychic tableau on a bedroom wall one frosty January night. She wore a shimmering, swirling red dress and, with her bearded companion, stood before an open, horse-drawn carriage. Her jet-black hair was parted severely down the middle and pulled back tightly over her ears; dark eyes twinkled above a veil that concealed the lower half of her face. She suddenly dropped the veil and stepped into the carriage with her partner. With that, the image vanished.
“I kept thinking I was dreaming, but yet I knew I was awake,” B. T. said. “My husband was snoring all the while this was going on. I was awake. And I was frightened.”
She got up, checked on her children, and then walked through the entire house, examining the security of each window and door from the basement to the top floor. Still uneasy, she went back to bed but slept poorly.
The next night the identical scene returned to the wall, but this time in black and white rather than the colorful depiction of the night before. This time, however, there was a new twist—the mysterious woman lowered her veil, turned to B. T., and smiled.
Sometime later, B. T. was invited to attend a séance. When she told the story of the mysterious woman and her companion, she was warned by the others present that because of the veil the woman was a negative spirit and not to be trusted. They suggested she put a mental “red circle of truth” around herself, her loved ones, and her home.
It was after midnight when she returned home. “I was scared to death. I wanted to leave all the lights on,” she recalled. The mental red circle of truth she had been advised to create didn’t seem adequate.
“I knew I wasn’t keeping anybody out because they were already in!”
As B. T. opened her front door, the woman from the ghostly montage was standing in the hallway. She looked exactly like she had looked on the wall, except that B. T. could see through her.
“Why are you so afraid of me?” asked the vaporous visitor. Before B. T. could reply, the specter sprung another surprise on her: she was, she said,
B. T.’s great-great-great-grandmother, Cassandra, and she had lived as a child in Virginia and Maryland a century and a half earlier.
B. T. thought she certainly didn’t seem like an evil spirit; in fact, Cassandra offered to guide and protect the family.
Later that day, B. T. told her husband and children about their spectral guest. Although none of them would ever see her, they sometimes felt her presence, like that of an invisible babysitter.
Little Danny, four years old at the time, was particularly unperturbed. “I know she’s here to help me,” he said. One morning the boy awoke in his top bunk bed with his back bruised and cut. The ladder to his bed was on the floor and there was a fresh dent in the bedroom wall that B. T. believed was made by the force of the falling ladder. Neither B. T. nor her husband had put their son back into bed after his apparent tumble. Danny had no recollection of the incident. The boy also survived a near drowning in a local swimming pool, B. T. maintains, with Cassandra’s help.
B. T. was a veteran genealogist when Cassandra first made her appearance. However, she had been unable to trace several branches of her family. B. T. found that in those years before the explosion of interest in genealogy and the advent of the Internet, some birth certificates could not be found and important marriage records were seldom available. Her ancestors had not kept a family Bible in which they might have noted family names and significant dates. B. T. claims Cassandra supplied the missing links, providing facts about family members that she was later able to verify through official documents.
B. T. believes that might have been the reason for Cassandra’s appearance. Ghosts have been known to leave familiar surroundings, traveling great distances to provide missing information or intervene in a crisis.
For instance, Cassandra disclosed her own maiden name and the date and
place of her marriage. B. T. followed up.
“I wrote to that county in Ohio and I [now] have her wedding license. When I gave a photocopy of the certificate to my grandmother, she was flabbergasted because she didn’t know this woman’s maiden name.”
Cassandra also supplied the names and birth dates of all her children. B. T. went directly to the census records and was able to confirm the number of children she had and their names.
Sometimes names and complete addresses of living relatives came to B. T. “out of a clear blue sky—people that I had no inkling of any connection with us. I didn’t even look up the addresses. I just wrote.”
More incredible still is B. T.’s claim to have twice visited Cassandra’s home. On each occasion, B. T. was transported there instantaneously. “I disappear and I am there,” she maintained. The two women have talked in Cassandra’s sitting room. B. T. has even seen Cassandra’s daughter, Mary Jane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident.
B. T. said that when she was in Cassandra’s home, the experience felt entirely real, but when she is with the ghost in her own home, “everything is in a haze.”
Some parapsychologists say people can leave their bodies and describe people and places they have never actually seen.
B. T. believes she could detect Cassandra’s presence in the home long before she appeared on the bedroom wall. Cassandra seemed to spend a lot of time by the front door, watching the children come and go. She also followed B. T. upstairs to tell her the phone was ringing or that someone was at the door.
Cassandra was a real and loving presence for B. T. Far from being the evil spirit others warned against, Cassandra was always a positive force, bolstering B. T.’s spirits in times of need and pushing her to do more than she ever thought possible.
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